Alison Lee: The Stories She Can Tell At UCLA!

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Alison Lee is still enrolled at UCLA, so the 20-year-old LPGA Tour rookie should have some fun stories to bring back to Los Angeles now that she's part of a winning Team USA effort in the Solheim Cup. And I'm pretty sure she'll never expect any putt to be good ever again. A good thing.

Jay Coffin at GolfChannel.com on the nutty week the rookie experienced at the Solheim Cup, which started out with food poisoning, included an incident that probably made her feel like she had more food poisoning, and ended with a 3&1 win over Gwladys Nocera.

She's good fun on Twitter, too.

Dottie: Entitlement Attitude Plaguing America's Women Golfers

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As the Solheim Cup is about to start, we're reminded again on the eve what makes these matches fun: emotions run high! Including from the outside, where first Jaime Diaz and now a former assistant captain, player and a confirmed patriot in Dottie Pepper is providing some nice bulletin board for our ladies on the eve of the matches.

Team events bringout the emotion!

Pepper writes:

As an assistant captain, I saw an American team two years ago that was completely outplayed by a brilliant team from Europe, but the stage was set, I believe, by an attitude of privilege -- the negative and synonymous descriptions listed above -- by some key players. Players who needed to set the tone for a let's-get-the-job-done week, rather than an attitude of inconvenience and entitlement. It's not about face paint and time set aside for team manicures, or whose stilettos cost more and are a quarter-inch higher, or hair stylists and makeup artists.

Zing!

This could pertain to any team match, male or female:

It's about conserving energy for a weeklong marathon, being positive about preparations, carving out the time to make sure you understand the intricacies of the golf course and the rules that will be in play that week. It's about doing what your captain asks, even if it means staying off social media during a weather delay. It's about doing things that are not normal -- not your own selfish routine -- because the Solheim Cup is anything but normal.

"Why Haven't We Gotten Behind Lydia Ko?"

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That's a question posed by Shane Bacon and it's a legit one as the golf community fawns over Jordan Spieth while the outside sports world yawns at both of these talents.

There are legitimate reasons to see why Ko-mania hasn't overtaken the game: she just won the fifth major that wasn't a major until recently and she's really a quality person whose only discernable neuroses was in caddie hiring, hardly making her unusual. But as we know, the world struggles with people who are pretty much all-around likeable.

That said, Bacon makes a statement that hits home, even for this Young Tom Morris fanboy.

She's already the greatest teenage golfer, male or female, in the history of golf, and now she's winning the biggest of the big with final rounds that match what Johnny Miller did at Oakmont back in 1973.

We as golf fans, and sports fans, need to do better on this front. Ko is making history. It's our responsibility to start paying attention.

He's right. She is the greatest teenager the game has ever seen.

Spieth is a nice guy too for an old man in his early 20s. He's super accessible and yet network cameras zoom right by him because Tiger Woods is in the same corporate box.

Is it that we want our superstars to be a little weird, a little mysterious and a little dark?

Are Spieth and Ko just too nice for the rest of the sports world to take notice?

How's that for a rhetorical question?

R.I.P. Louise Suggs

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One of the LPGA's founders and earliest stars who also became known for her name brand club lines, has died at 91.

Frank Litsky's NY Times remembrance of the 11-time major winner.

Suggs won 58 pro tournaments, including 50 on the tour. Her 11 major titles included the 1949 United States Women’s Open, which she won by 14 strokes, the most one-sided victory on the tour until Laura Davies won a tournament by 16 strokes in 1995. Suggs won every season of her professional career and in 1957, at the L.P.G.A. Championship, became the first player on the tour to capture the career Grand Slam, winning all of the tour’s major events. The L.P.G.A. Tour’s rookie of the year award is named after Suggs.

Doug Ferguson with the Associated Press obituary.

Her efficient, powerful swing marked her for greatness as a teenager in Georgia. She began to get national acclaim when she won the 1947 U.S. Women's Amateur, the 1948 Women's British Amateur and the 1949 U.S. Women's Open, beating fierce rival Babe Zaharias by 14 shots.

Ben Hogan once said after watching Suggs swing that her swing "combines all the desirable elements of efficiency, timing and coordination."

The LPGA posted this remembrance video:

Golfweek posted this conversation with Suggs almost two years ago.